Southside Place Park

The park on this plaque anchors a city of about one square mile. Edward Crain's 1924 plat laid out 329 lots on low prairie, and in 1934 its 600 residents incorporated Southside Place, an independent municipality almost encircled by West University Place and Bellaire inside the 610 Loop. The population held near 1,400 before World War II, peaked around 1,500 in the 1960s and fell to 1,263 by 1979. In the 1980s the park, in which every property owner had a share and a vote, and a strip of three dozen businesses formed its heart.

What the plaque says

Southside Place Park Southside Place Park is the geographic and civic center of the City of Southside Place, an early Houston suburb. From 1895-1922, the area was part of the Harris County Poor Farm, a county-owned facility for the indigent. However, as residential development spread towards the farm, county commissioners deemed the land too valuable for public use and built a new "county home" on 100 acres east of Houston. In 1924, Edward Lillo Crain (1885-1950) purchased the southern tract of the former poor farm, as well as frontage along Bellaire Boulevard, on which to develop Southside Place. The combined parcel of about 107 acres cost Crain $101,542. Crain developed the park first, with plans to fill the development with inexpensive, uniformly-designed homes under the banner of the Crain ready-cut house company. The park featured prominently in Crain's marketing. Its amenities, including a 30-by-75-foot concrete swimming pool, a wading pool, bath house, tennis court and play equipment, distinguished the development from all others in the Houston area. Deed restrictions stipulated that the permanent park and playground was "for the exclusive use and benefit of property owners." In 1932, Crain deeded the park to the Southside Place Park Association, which owned and operated the space for 80 years. Ownership of the park was later transferred to the City of Southside Place. Over the years, the park has been expanded and modernized. One notable addition occurred in 1970 when the city's first fire truck was retired and repurposed as a piece of play equipment; thereafter, the park became known as "Fire Truck Park." For a century, Southside Place Park has been the defining feature of the community as well as a place of enjoyment and leisure for residents. (2022)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• The Menil Collection — 2.8 mi
  John and Dominique de Menil's free museum in Montrose: a grey-sided Renzo Piano building among bungalows, holding antiquities, Surrealism and art of Oceania under natural light.
• Museum of Fine Arts, Houston — 2.9 mi
  The oldest art museum in Texas, grown from a 1900 schoolroom art league into a campus of Watkin, Mies van der Rohe and later buildings, with Ima Hogg's Bayou Bend up the bayou.
• Rothko Chapel — 3.0 mi
  An octagonal chapel open to all faiths, built by the de Menils around fourteen dark canvases by Mark Rothko, with Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk standing in the pool outside.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 3.8 mi
  A museum in Houston's 1925 Light Guard Armory that tells the service of Black soldiers from the Revolutionary War onward, built from one veteran's thirty years of collecting.

More markers nearby

• City of West University Place — 0.3 mi
• Harris County Poor Farm — 0.9 mi
• Teas Nursery Company — 1.0 mi
• Texan Capture of Mexican Dispatches (San Jacinto) — 1.8 mi